"An Online Odyssey"
April 10, 1999
"An Online Odyssey"
A little over three years ago I hesitantly picked up the phone and called the "offices" of a pair of young computer upstarts: Jeff and Thorpe, the owners and operators of Visual Internet Services. Two hours later, after an arduous session of step-by-step phone directions, I was connected to the Internet, had a free copy of Netscape loaded onto my computer, and was staring at my monitor. What in the world was I doing? I tentatively began clicking here and there, not sure if I would be lured into pornographic dungeons, lost in research libraries, or sucked down some black hole of technological hell. I was truly on foreign soil.
I found my way into an online community college and worked through an HTML tutorial. By the time the quarter was over, I felt confident enough to design my own web site. I knew my ISP included free web space in my service, but I hadn't a clue how to access it. I wrote to J & T asking how to get my pages online. They told me I just had to use any FTP and send them over. Well, duh. Unfortunately, it never dawned on them that perhaps the lady who required 2 hours of handholding to get online might just not know what the hell FTP meant.
I literally had to import my own computer guru to accomplish the deed. Karsten Skyt Nielsen came out from Michigan to meet my family and me for the first time, and when he asked how he could repay our kindness I sat him down at my computer and said, "Get my web pages online."
On April 12, 1996, the Lemke Family Page erupted on the World Wide Web, and my online odyssey began. I've been exploring ever since, and in the process I have embraced computer technology into my teaching. Three years have flown by, and yet they seem an eternity. I have almost no recollection of life BI (before Internet). Fears and insecurities have been replaced with confidence and urgencies. I'm forever seeking more experiences and knowledge, and I've discovered how much I love helping others learn to love computers.
I don't pretend to know much, but I definitely know enough to enjoy what I'm doing, and I do seem to have a knack for helping novices learn. Whether I'm working with children or adults, I have discovered that my own frustrating experiences in the beginning of my self-education give me the patience and know-how to teach others to use computers and various software.
Two rules guide me: never touch another's mouse, and always demystify things. Three years ago, the only people who could help me were young, cocky males who apparently felt the need to show-off their expertise by throwing out technical jargon right and left (Karsten excluded). I think it was a guy thing. These twenty-somethings would rattle off numbers and acronyms in a geeky horn-butting way. At first I was intimidated. Then as I learned more, it dawned on me. Most of these guys had little idea what they were saying. They just spewed out the terms to SOUND like they were computer-literate.
The mystique soon wore off. Just as you don't need to know how to assemble an engine in order to drive a car, you don't need to know how to program in MS-DOS in order to operate a computer. You don't even need to know HTML to create web pages anymore. Computers are just tools.
So now in my odyssey I am helping others enjoy these marvelous high-tech tools. I teach children and adults, and I try to keep it simple. My rule of thumb is: you will learn how to do something when you need it. As my colleagues in education begin to wrangle with their Compaq laptops and WindowsNT, I reassure them that they, too, will be able to remember how to do all sorts of things on their computers WHEN they NEED those things! Desire is a marvelous motivator.
I teach my students mostly by exposing them to hardware and software and then letting them run amok. They make mistakes, but more often than not they end up knowing far more than I do. THEY become the teachers, for me and for other students. I've simply started them off on their own odysseys.